Knitta Please | Knitters Are Cozy Urban Graffiti Artists

via Stickkontakt website

ArtTracker| Sweden has a zero tolerance policy for street graffiti, prompting the three female founders of Stockholm’s “guerrilla knitting” group, Stickkontakt to take action.

Inspired by the Houston group, Knitta Please, Stickkontakt decorate everything from lampposts and bins to park benches and tree trunks with colorful yarns. “We often have political messages,” Maskan tells me. “But sometimes we don’t. Once, we decided to celebrate Sweden’s few female statues by dressing up four of them as super heroines.” via Christian Science Monitor

One of the members of Stickkontakt is a cofounder of Masquerade, also dedicated to making “soft art” graffiti statements with a potential for global impact. The women just returned from a trip where they used knitting graffiti to “tag” along the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia, Mongolia, and China.

Bringing it back home, I Google Houston group Knitta Please. I never considered any form of serious “political disobedience” coming out of Texas. Before I can go to Houston, Google gives me options all over America, including Brooklyn, just across the river from me.

from the 69 Meters public art installation commissioned by the Montague Street Business Improvement District Voila. Knitta Please has hit Brooklyn, leaving public art installation on Montague Street, last May 2009. My fav dog — a bijon frisse — just loved it.

This is one little example of public disobedience going mainstream, and that brings a smile to my face.

From facing fines and jail time (just kidding, but somewhere in the world there’s at least one cut off your hands policy for graffiti knitting) to being adopted by Brooklyn’s “Montague Street Business Improvement District, global knitters — primarily women — on a crusade.

Love it! And for once, the American women are not only involved, we’re leading the coffee klatch. Anne